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Twenty years after his first movie, the neon and slow-mo romance As Tears Go By, Hong Kong’s snazziest director is in theaters with his thinnest feature to date, My Blueberry Nights, a film that, as previously noted in these pages, begs the question of whether Wong Kar-Wai isn’t more credible in subtitles than in American-English dialogue. Because of its routine HK gangster trappings, Tears is usually thought of as the cute genre hit that liberated the genius from his day job as a hack screenwriter (if only things had gone similarly for his recurring lovelorn penman, Tony Leung’s Mr. Chow). Down the road, though, this main course of sadness is going to hold up a whole lot better than this spring’s creamy dessert — Vanilla Nights is more like it — for two reasons: Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau, as cousins in love. Eat your heart out, Jude Law and Norah Jones.
May 2-8 at BAM
May 2-8 at BAM
